Steve Jobs possessed far more than simply an exacting eye for detail in the design of Apple (AAPL) products. He had the ability to conjure magic in those lines and curves and sleek Parisian fonts. The translucent glow of the Bondi blue iMac, the way the iPod practically begs to be caressed, the feather-light flick of a finger over the face of an iPad — these were Jobs' true gifts to the world.

Of course, Jobs had help from other magicians with exacting eyes in creating that wonderful whatever-it-was that he once said "makes our hearts sing."

"I don't recall Steve ever taking a pencil to paper and telling us 'Do it like this,'" said former Apple design guru Jerry Manock, who collaborated with Jobs on the original Macintosh computer. "Instead, he would encourage us to try different things, different aesthetic treatments to achieve the goal he had in the back of his mind. He'd say 'What are ten different ways to treat the bottom curve on this product? Come back and show me them tomorrow.' "

From his early days with the Macintosh, and then with the iMac and subsequent conga line of jaw-dropping consumer gadgets, Jobs' gospel was that good design is clean and simple, and it must enhance the customer's experience. Seeking what he would call "elegance" and "taste" in everything Apple did, his look-and-feel passion extended far beyond the product, encompassing packaging (a ritual to help the user connect with the thing right out of the box), advertising and even the Apple Store.

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Jobs and his team weren't simply designing the gadget; they were designing an entire lifestyle to go along with it. In the process, he somehow seemed to know what consumers wanted before they knew it themselves.

"Steve had a way of making the rest of us see the world as he saw it," said Prasad Kaipa, a physicist who worked at Apple in the 1980s training its engineers. "He and his team would design not just for form and function, but for the underlying purpose of the thing. So even if you haven't exactly identified it, when you find it you realize 'Aha! This is exactly what I needed!' "

Medici for the tech age

While Jobs' name appears on many of the patents behind this tech wizardry, and his attention to minutiae is legendary, his design prowess was manifested more as the obsessive and sometimes dictatorial ringleader, the whiz-kid who pushed his people to both dream big and focus small.

Stanford University professor Barry Katz interviewed Jobs for a book he's writing about the history of Silicon Valley design. He said one former colleague described the Apple CEO as a sort of Lorenzo de Medici, the Florentine benefactor who nurtured Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci.

"Lorenzo wouldn't get an idea from Michelangelo and price it out," said Katz. "He would find the guys with the greatest talents and let them do what they do best. In the same way, Steve Jobs won't be remembered as a designer extraordinaire any more than Lorenzo de Medici will be remembered as a sculptor extraordinaire.

"But there was a single-mindedness and visionary quality to this guy that really defined Apple," said Katz. "And I think Jobs probably did more than any other single person to drive Silicon Valley's design phenomenon."

Longtime colleague and Silicon Valley marketing ace Regis McKenna said Jobs "had a lot more breadth than people think. He was well-read and had a great cultural sense of not only design but of music and literature. He'd come out with things that would shock people because they were expecting him to be nerdy."

Jobs' intuitive sense of design blossomed at Apple, say those who knew him. In many ways, it was not what Jobs did but what he didn't do that led to so many successes.

Scot Herbst, a product designer who did extensive work on Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) touch-screen desktop computer, said Jobs' real genius was that "he exercised with a strong singular voice Apple's complete embrace of the use of restraint in design. By simplifying a gadget's buttons and downsizing a desktop's silhouette to make it appear smaller, Jobs' helped set Apple apart from "the rest of the consumer electronics world," which Herbst said is often riddled with "feature creep."

Fashionable gadgets

Collaborating closely with people such as Jonathan Ive, Apple's designer-in-chief and a legend in his own right, Jobs fostered an approach to product design that to futurist Paul Saffo evoked haute couture as much as high-tech.

"Before Steve, people didn't design computers, they made computers," said Saffo. "Steve turned them into fashion. His were the first to come in a color other than putty. And he made Apple's rate of innovation more like the pace of the fashion industry, where twice a year you'd come up with something new."

To Saffo, it was the iPod that truly captured Apple's design aesthetic. "You can tell when a device is really well-designed because it'll delight its user when it's turned off as much as when it's on," he said. "When the iPod is off, it looks like this magical water-washed rock, and you want to just hold it in your hand like a talisman."

Jobs would push his designers with a leadership style laced with both fatherly prodding and an intimidating arrogance. The result was products that weren't just electronic gizmos -- they were glimmering tools to help users create, explore and share.

"The hardware is the front door to the software and the services," said analyst Tim Bajarin with Creative Strategies. "And while the PC guys tend to create stuff that was clunky and inelegant, Apple took the approach that even though these devices needed to be functional, they also needed to be beautiful."